


soma

by arealsword



Series: melliferous-verse [2]
Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hadestown Fusion, Body Horror, Bugs & Insects, Cannibalism, Character Death, Corpse Desecration, F/F, Gen, Seasonal Celebrations, Substance Abuse, schrodinger's tragedy, time loops, unreality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-26 00:41:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30097647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arealsword/pseuds/arealsword
Summary: What’s that thing people say about ignorance?or, Thomas is dead, but that's old news. Let's go get some answers.
Relationships: Thomas & The Sides
Series: melliferous-verse [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2214642
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	soma

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr because I was semi-egged into writing it there by my followers. Thanks, guys.
> 
> It's less of a full-on New Addition to the melliferous multiverse (because apparently that’s a thing now) and more of a brief meander into the ideas that were established by [barbed wire and mothwings](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29110788), [It's Okay My Dear (This Is A Circular Story)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29196831) and [come my way and stay](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29407506). I stand on the shoulders of really astoundingly good writers, so go check those out. It's really good writing (REALLY good) and will also help this make so much more sense.
> 
> Also, mind those warnings.

_For I was hungry, and I ate you. I was thirsty, and I drank you_. [sic] – Matthew 25:35

*

i.

“You know what’s bugging me?” Thomas says, millions of cycles into all of this, and two swiftly-downed shot glasses into the last of Lady Seph’s newest round of stock.

“Haha, bugs.” Patton lowers his glass of starfire briefly to give a weak fingergun in Thomas’s direction. “Because – you know, everything’s bugs down here for some reason?”

Logan is halfway to drunk and halfway to dead already. It’s just one of those lifetimes. The fact that’s he’s mostly dust and barely able to hold up his glass does not, however, stop him from theorizing, “You know, it really is entirely possible that they aren’t _actually_ insects, and their carapacian forms are a result of some form of convergent evolution.”

“Stop trying to apply _logic_ to them,” Roman moans. He makes a face and raises a sleeve to his mouth to try to scrub the taste of honey off of his tongue. It lingers strangely, sweetly. “Haven’t you ever heard of willing suspension of disbelief? We’re not meant to understand this.”

Remus is dissolving. But cheerfully. “Yeah, it’s more fun this way!”

“For a certain definition of fun, sure,” is Virgil’s muttered take.

“Or maybe the evolution path was divergent in form. A potential split somewhere along the line, dividing from beings of a celestial persuasion into what we find ourselves as today into insectoid and humanoid, both created in their image...”

“It _does_ appear that God has an inordinate fondness for beetles,” says Janus. “Holistically, that is.”

Thomas frowns. “...Guys, are we having oblique yet resonant Socratic dialogue again?”

“When are we not? Someone check for cameras, I’d hate for _this_ one to go up online, unedited,” Janus replies, somewhat sardonically, and raises his own glass. “Refill, if you would.”

A flurry of flowers, a fluttering of wings, and good old Auntie Seph is back again with another bottle of gods-knows-what. “Y’all ain’t sticking around for long this time, huh?”

“A few more minutes, maybe,” Virgil confirms as she passes by and swishes back into the darkness of the bar to continue her evening rounds. “I think I’m really going off steak at this point, honestly.”

“What were you saying, Thomas?” Roman asks, trying to sit up straighter. “Something bugging you? Something you can’t quite, um – ”

“Bee-lieve?” Patton supplies.

“Sure. Uh. The steak,” Thomas says. “I had some this time, you know? It was...” He struggles for words.

“Delicious,” Virgil says with a grimace.

“Remarkably well-seasoned for something drenched in honey and not much else,” Roman comments, who had also partaken in the steak this time around for some unknown, unknowable reason.

“Human!” Remus crows, teeth flashing white in the dimness of the lowly-lit bar. “Soylent Green is people! Or did I make that joke already...?”

“We all knew it was human flesh, Remus,” Logan sighs, listing even further sideways. “It’s not as if there are any cows down here to harvest the steak from, let alone any other animals. And if you examine the entomology and feeding habits of the American vulture bee – ”

“The humans around here don’t look very, um. Meaty,” Thomas says. “Just saying. It’s – they’re – ”

“Hollow? They would be,” Janus points out. “In case you haven’t noticed, the bees are sucking them dry. They’re all essentially husks.”

“So where does she get the steak from?” Thomas asks again, and nobody has an answer for them, most likely because they’re all far too busy shrivelling away into the darkness.

“Oh, never mind,” Patton yawns. “We’re dead anyway. What does it matter?”

“...Good point. I’ll work it out next time.” Thomas studies the bar with bleary eyes. The faded photographs and portraits on the walls, the legions of shades drinking in their usual solemn silence. “So where do you go when you die if you’re already in hell?”

“Hell 2,” Remus suggests, slumping against the bar, “This Time With More Capitalism.”

“Not too loud, you’ll give my wife ideas,” Seph tells them from across the bar, and raises her glass to them. A farewell toast. “And don’t you think too hard about the steak thing. You’ll only end up hurting yourself.”

And then it’s dust to dust, and the wheel begins to turn again. 

*

ii.

The party’s in full swing when Virgil says to Thomas, quite frankly, “I hate parties.”

The lights are bright above them. The air is fresh with the birth of spring, and the music is loud and ringing through the air like a hailing chorus fit for the arrival of a queen.

Thomas clears his throat after a moment. “Okay, not that I don’t appreciate the commentary... but, uh, Virge-?”

“I’m here because you’re anxious,” Virgil supplies, folding his arms and resting his head on top of them. “ _Parties_ , man. Just stay home and browse Netflix for the millionth time, why don’t you?”

“It’s good for me to get out, and also, I’m pretty sure you don’t need to be here for me to be anxious. It happens anyway. That wasn’t what I was going to ask.” He rests his hand on a nearby tree and watches Logan and Patton attempting to reconcile their two extremely different ideas of ‘dancing’, on the fly, on the dance floor. “...Why are you sitting on my shoulders?”

“I like being tall,” replies Virgil.

“Hm,” says Thomas. “Okay, fair enough.”

Janus is over in the far corner chatting with the grinning man; the one with the hat and the constantly-in-motion wings and the laugh like the rattling of a lock clicking open. They’re talking about car chases and unlikely escapes and flights into the night, they’re comparing false identities and secrets they’ve never told anyone else; they’re lying wildly to each other.

On top of a table of cakes and sweetmeats piled high to the heavens, Remus perches and engages in deep, fascinated conversation with a lady whose crystal-cut eyes shine in the bright sunlight. They speak of rot, of rebirth, of blazing heat and screaming cold. Her wings are familiar. Nothing else about her is. That’s another story, though, one to be told later.

“Well, this is new,” says Seph, sauntering over. A crooked flower crown rests in her hair with all the colors of spring, and the wine glass her long spindly fingers are curled securely around seems to be filled with actual proper honest-to-god wine. Her eyes are bright, her coat is long, her wings are radiant. “Now, what brings a scattered disaster of a man like you to a party like this?”

Thomas blinks. Virgil’s arms, looped loosely around the top of his head, tighten. “I’m... sorry, do I know you?”

“In a roundabout sort of way, maybe,” she replies, and swirls the wine before slurping it up with that long, long tongue of hers. “Lady of the spring, at your service. You here by invite, or-?”

“Hey, I can’t actually remember how we got here,” Virgil mutters into Thomas’s hair.

Thomas hovers, suddenly extremely worried. “Should I. Like. Leave?”

“Not a worry. The blooming of spring is a party for _everyone_ ,” she says wisely, and then grins wide and sharp and tosses her empty glass to one side, where it shatters into crystal shards and light. “‘Specially me. Even if I’m late. ‘ _Specially_ if I’m late. Have you tried the food? It’s to die for, and for once ya don’t even have to die to eat it!”

“...Is this a fairy ring?” Virgil says suspiciously, peering down at her from his perch on Thomas’shoulders. “You legally have to tell us if it’s a fairy ring, otherwise it’s entrapment.”

Seph laughs. “Naw. Different story, that. Don’t worry too much about the details, just have fun – it ain’t gonna last for very long.” She adjusts the flowers adorning her head, tucking chrysanthemum blooms back to stop them falling over her eyes, and extends a hand in Thomas’s direction. Her long fingers wiggle; an invitation. “Here, come on and dance, kiddo, while we’ve still got the time.”

Virgil sighs and complains but gets down from Thomas’s shoulders with a catlike tumble that leaves him crouched on the ground, and he claps Thomas on the shoulder before going to join Remus.

Seph isn’t any threat. Not here, not to them. She’s a friend, in a roundabout sort of way.

“All right,” says Thomas. “So, let’s dance.”

The music blares, rising with brass and percussion and strings struck with purpose and energy both. Out onto the dance floor with them, and into the fray. Seph dances like she drinks – careless and wild; sloppy but purposeful. She whirls them around, cackling in time with the music-from-nowhere, kicking up her heels in the dirt. She’s a different person entirely, up here, full of light and laughter and a kind of rusted-and-rough love for everything around her.

Thomas lets her lead and lets her swing and swirl him around in mad spirals, wild and free as a honeybee in a summertime frame of mind. They laugh and yell and stomp and he thinks he might have started to sing along at some point, although there’s no earthly way he should know the words.

“But what about the steak?” Thomas asks as she pulls away and he stumbles back, dizzy and high on the thrill of life.

“What _about_ the steak?” she replies, and there’s another glass of wine in her hand already. “Don’t you know what they say about ignorance? See you when winter comes around, sugar. Let’s hope we get it right this time, hey?”

*

iii.

Virgil sits and goes at it with a fork-and-knife, breaking the steak up into bite-sized chunks. It’s tough and he has to saw a bit to cut through. Juices bubble and spill across his plate, honey pooling in concentric little patterns. The centre of it is red-rare; just like he likes. He spears a chunk with his fork, and holds it to his lips.

He doesn’t take a bite.

He says, “I don’t get why we have to do this.”

Remus says, “Sure you do, it’s what we do every time. I say ‘funny how it doesn’t feel like much of a choice at all’, and you say – ”

“This is some sort of cycle, isn’t it? Some kind of loop.”

“Uh, no?” Remus puts down his steak. (He doesn’t bother using the knife. His hands are sticky with honey and meat-juice. Although the honey is a kind of meat-juice too, if you think about it.) “You’ve never said _that_ before. Usually it’s something sardonic to hide the fact that you’re extremely freaked out.”

“Remus,” says Virgil thoughtfully, still staring at his fork.

“Mm?”

“How often are you _aware_ of the fact that we’re stuck in some kind of horrible time loop cycle?”

“Oh, only when it’s funny,” says Remus, and tears off a long, thick strip of meat from his meal with his back teeth.

“Right,” says Virgil. “Right, okay.” He pauses. “So, have we figured out where the steak comes from yet, or..?”

“Shh,” says Remus, sloppily raising a filthy-sweet finger to Virgil’s lips. “Don’t spoil the moment, Great Skittish Bake-Off. I _never_ get invited over for family dinner, this is a novelty.”

“Gosh, I wonder _why,_ ” Virgil mutters, but shuts up and eats his damned steak like a good little cog in the machine.

iv.

“Okay, here’s another question,” Thomas says, tossing a stone into the Styx. It doesn’t make a sound, mainly because an infinite number maggots don’t tend to have much surface tension to break. “When you all went and decided ‘right, time to go get Thomas back from being extremely dead’...”

“Mm?” says Janus, sorting through their makeshift tacklebox with an absent look on his face.

“...Do you _want_ to explain why your first thought was _let's go to hell_?”

Patton acquires an extremely shifty look on his face, and doesn’t reply. Instead, he casts his fishing line high and wide, and nods approvingly as the hook and lure and end of the line disappear into the seething mass of maggots.

“What are you even fishing _for,_ ” Virgil complains, trying to smudge excess honey off his clothes. “More maggots? It’s not like there’s any fish in that whole mess.”

“You don’t know that,” insists Patton, stubbornly optimistic. “There _might_ be fish.”

“Dead fish, maybe,” Logan says dryly.

“Guys, no, _seriously._ What specifically did I do to make you think I was in hell. I mean, you weren’t wrong, but I – I really desperately need to know your reasoning, come on, don’t just – ”

Remus lies on his stomach several distance away. He’s also fishing, but he’s doing it with his bare hands. Which doesn’t seem very safe or sanitary, but stopping him would probably be more trouble than it’s worth. “Maybe he’s fishing for the steak,” he suggests.

“That’s even more unlikely than the fish,” Roman replies, snorting.

“Eh. ‘Bout as likely as anything that goes on down here.” Remus makes a wild swipe into the river and comes up with a bloody fistful of maggots. “Just saying. Maybe that’s how she gets her hands on the meat. She dredges through the river and pulls out the people that fell in and fries them all up for dinner, sweet and hot.”

“If the maggots don’t get to them first,” Virgil points out.

Remus holds up his hand obligingly, letting everyone see that his fistful of maggots are currently going absolutely to town on the meat of his hand. Bone is gleaming through the raw-hamburger mess of red and more red.

“I thought maggots only went for dead flesh,” Patton hums, and jolts as his fishing rod jerks and bends, straining against some pressure on the other end of the rod.

“Patton,” says Thomas glumly, having resigned himself to the fact that nobody at all is planning to answer his extremely pertinent and important question, “I have to break this to you, I really do, but we are all _extremely_ dead.”

“Oh, yeah,” Patton says, reeling in his catch. “Ha! I keep forgetting about that, would you believe it? Now, I wonder what I caught...”

The catch is maggots. It’s all maggots, down there. Some are much livelier than others, but still maggots. Not that any of that’s going to stop Patton, though. What’s that thing people tend to say about hope?

*

v.

Back straight, hands clasped, chair pulled up tight as it can go to the lip of the kitchen table. His leg jitters on the underside of the table, his nervousness invisible in the darkness.

“I just want to see,” Thomas says.

Missus Hades hums lowly to herself, before raising her cigarette up and away, letting the smoke peel off towards the dark ceiling tiles. The lights buzz, or maybe that’s the bees. “You really won’t like what you find, you know.”

“Let me guess,” says Virgil, pressed up tight in the corner like he’s trying to melt into Thomas’s side. “We never do.”

“Don’t know about that,” she says. “Far as I’m aware, you’ve never asked. I just know you’re really not going to like it.”

The smoke doesn’t smell scratchy and musty in the way that Thomas expects cigarette-smoke to smell. It’s like a bonfire. Maybe a bit floral. A hint of nostalgia to it.

“We’ve been doing this for so long,” Logan says. The lighting in here does weird things to his glasses, makes them all honey-red-shiny and alien. He doesn’t come in here often, never has. “If it doesn’t impact us, surely there’s no harm in telling us. And if it does, we really would like to know.”

Missus Hades leans sideways, bends down to skritch-scratch one of her larger-than-average pets behind its ears, or where its ears would be. They seem to enjoy it, at the very least. Her smile is sideways and strange and barely genuine. “Now what’s that they say about curiosity, again?”

“There’s no cats down here,” Roman points out. “Just bees.”

“An _unholy_ amount of bees,” Janus mutters, shifting back into the shadows. He never seems to like Hades’s house. Not that any of them do, but – well.

“Fine,” says Hades, and stubs out her cigarette, crushing it under the heel of one shining chitinous hand. “Now, follow me, and don’t you go and say I didn’t warn you.”

You’d think that the layout of Missus Hades’s house would be simple, looking at it from the outside. But two hallways down and two stairways up and three right turns (and not necessarily in that order, either) and none of them could even begin to recall how to get to where they’re going.

It’s in the middle of a hallway like any other, in fact. Just another room in a house far too vast for one person to live in alone. Looks like she and her wife haven’t quite fixed things up properly, not this time around, but oh well. There’s always time and there’s always next time.

The door is locked and the door is solid metal. Not a lot of metal down here, come to think of it, not in the buildings. It’s just for the garden gates and the deadbolts, and anything made to keep people _out._

Hades fishes for keys in the deep thick pockets of her long skirts. Thomas watches, and so do everyone else. They’re all here, which is nice – it doesn’t happen all the time, but it’s better when they’re all together.

“All right,” says Hades, and the door unlocks with a click. She pushes it open, flicks on the lights, and steps back.

It’s clean; almost obsessively tidy. The knives are sharp and shiny, the equipment not _new_ but definitely well-maintained. The butcher knows what she’s doing. It would almost be pristine if it weren’t for the bloodied countertop and the source of the meat, which is –

Thomas takes an instinctive step back.

There is a pile of him on the ground, in various states of decay and dismemberment.

He recognizes the shirts, even. Lots of flowers. He’s always liked the flower shirts. His gaze travels sideways, to the countertop where a new steak is being prepared.

Oh. All right.

Okay.

“I really don’t know what I expected,” Thomas says.

Hades shrugs; the shifting of a mountain. Her face is impassive, although she seems to be watching him closely. “Neither do I, if I’m completely honest.”

Virgil says, “I’m going to go throw up now,” and does. He at least goes to do it outside, which is kind of him. The smells’ awful enough in here as it is. 

“I’ve heard of eating your heart out, but...” Patton trails off, and winces, going pale. “...Nevermind. I’m going to go join Virgil.”

“Well, hey,” says Remus. “It kind of makes sense. You are what you eat, you know?”

“Remus,” says Logan flatly. “Please shut up.”

“You don’t like me much, do you?” Thomas asks.

Hades tilts her head; her version of a startled blink. She sounds genuinely confused when she asks, “What makes you say that?”

“You are repeatedly carving up Thomas’s lifeless remains to serve to variations on his personality as a last meal,” Logan summarizes, rather succinctly – his steady voice a neat counterpoint to the whiteness of his knuckles and the faint trembling of his lips. “Are you telling me that is how you treat people you hold any sort of affection for?”

“You were hungry,” comes the reply. “I never forced you to eat, only served you the meal. Why for the love of all things above and below would that mean I hold any sort of animosity towards you? I don’t _not_ like you, Thomas Sanders. And trust me, if I disliked you, you’d know about it.”

Logan stares at her for a long, long moment, and then turns on his heel and walks out of the room as fast as he can.

After a moment, Roman follows, not even saying a word.

Janus takes Thomas’s arm, and steers him out of the butchery. “Next time, let’s pick something _other_ than the steak to fixate on, hm?” he says, voice entirely too calm.

“Hm, I’ll drink to that,” Thomas agrees, letting himself be steered. “And drink. And drink. And keep on drinking. Hey, let’s go to Seph’s right now; I feel like developing a major alcohol dependency for the sake of my own mental health. Who’s with me?”

They pretty much all are, not that it matters. This time around is going to be over soon enough, just like the others, and it really is completely up to chance whether any of them will remember this, or will remember it in time, or will even care.

Hades, alone in the butcher’s room, picks up a clean knife. She weighs it from side to side, thoughtful. She doesn’t exactly understand all the fuss – meat is meat, after all, no matter where it comes from. She doesn’t regret sharing the information, only that her wife may be upset by the fallout.

She’s wearing her nice clothes, and she never likes staining the gold and white – it’s absolute hell to get out, and she of all people knows that’s not an exaggeration – so she replaces the knife and casts one last glance around the room before turning and stepping out with the _shift shift shift_ of moving fabric and the gentle _clik-clak_ of boots on marble floor.

The light clicks off.

The smell of meat lingers.

*


End file.
